1044 A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE
the AJbbot's Tribunal, he said to himself that his real difficulty
was with the wayward and emotional nature of the Glastonbury
natives themselves. "And it's the same," he thought, "with Spear
and old Geard; yes! and even with the double-dyed fool
Robinson.
"Our little society can deal easily enough with these pilgrims
and visitors. We can grow rich upon them; and we can make
them obey our rules or keep them out by our requisitions. It's the
natives who'll break this thing up, when it is broken up; and
I don't give it more than a couple of years, at the best! Yes, it's
the natives who'll ruin the whole thing!"
Thus he pondered; and to the same tune and to the same moan
had Avallach and Arthur, Alfred and Edmund, Dunstan and
Edgar, Whiting and Monmouth, yes, and Mr. Recorder King! all
pondered in their day and in their hour.
He paused for a moment at the gate of the Tribunal, just as
Mary Crow had once done and gazed with a sad, disenchanted
eye upon that beautiful late-gothic facade.
"Does it need a brute like Judge Jeffreys," he thought, "or does
it need a saint like St. Joseph, or like this crazy Sam Dekker,
to deal with these Glastonbury autochthones? Old Geard can
handle them when he wants to; but he never seems to want to.
God knows where that old charlatan's mind is carrying him now.
Not to the building up of any possible community that / can
visualise!"
His hand was upon the handle of the Tribunal's main entrance
when two little girls—one of them carrying a sturdy child in her
arms—passed close by him.
"Bert can say 'Glastonbury be a commune/ Bert can; just like
teacher tells we to," said the little girl who was carrying the
child.
"C ... 0 ... M ... com—U ... N ... E ... .oon . . .
commoon!" murmured Bert proudly, from the arms of a still
prouder Sis.
But Morgan Nelly, as usual, dashed this simple glory into a
thousand melancholy pieces, to be carried away on an obscure
wind. "Glaston baint no such thing," she cried in her shrill,
mocking elf-voice. "Glaston be a person, like I be, and persons